"Touch and double touch," Hissune called. "Match."

"How did you do that?" asked Alsimir, tossing down his baton.

Hissune laughed. "I have no idea. But I wish Thani had been here to see it!" He dropped to a kneeling position and let sweat drip freely from his forehead onto the mats. It had been, he knew, an amazing display of skill. Never had he fought that well before. An accident, a moment of luck? Or had he truly reached a new level of accomplishment? He recalled Lord Valentine speaking of his juggling, which he had taken up in the most casual of ways, merely to earn a livelihood, when he was wandering lost and bewildered in Zimroel. Juggling, the Coronal had said, had shown him the key to the proper focusing of his mental abilities.

Lord Valentine had gone so far as to suggest that he might not have been able to regain his throne, but for the disciplines of spirit that his mastery of juggling had imposed on him. Hissune knew he could hardly take up juggling himself—it would be too blatant a flattery of the Coronal, too open a gesture of imitation—but he was beginning to see that he might attain much of the same discipline through wielding the baton.

Certainly his performance just now had carried him into extraordinary realms of perception and achievement. He wondered if he was capable of repeating it. He looked up and said, "Well, shall we go another, one on two?"

"Don't you ever get tired?" Stimion said.

"Of course I do. But why stop just because you're tired?"

He took his stance again, waiting for them. Another fifteen minutes of this, he thought. Then a swim, and then to the Pinitor Court to get some work done, and then—

"Well? Come at me," he said.

Alsimir shook his head. "There's no sense in it. You're getting too good for us."

"Come," Hissune said again. "Ready!"

Somewhat reluctantly Alsimir moved into dueling position, and gestured Stimion to do the same. But as the three men stood poised, bringing their minds and bodies to the degree of balance the match required, a gymnasium attendant stepped out on the balcony above them and called Hissune's name. A message for the prince, he said, from the Regent Elidath: Prince Hissune is asked to report at once to the Regent at the office of the Coronal.

"Another day, then?" Hissune said to Alsimir and Stimion.

He dressed quickly and made his way upward and through the intricate coils and tangles of the Castle, cutting across courtyards and avenues, past Lord Ossier's parapet and its amazing view of Castle Mount's vast slope, on beyond the Kinniken Observatory and the music room of Lord Prankipin and Lord Confalume's garden-house and the dozens of other structures and outbuildings that clung like barnacles to the core of the Castle. At last he reached the central sector, where the offices of government were, and had himself admitted to the spacious suite in which the Coronal worked, now occupied during Lord Valentine's prolonged absence by the High Counsellor Elidath.